A Quick Guide to What you Need to Know to take Part in Stoic Week

Please try to read it this weekend and prepare yourself for Stoic Week!

Registration is now closed – thanks to all who registered – it will really help with establishing an evidence base for Stoicism!

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NB. If you’ve come across Stoic Week just now – please do still take part and follow the Handbook, and share your experience of Stoic Week on the blog’s ‘how’s it going?’ posts! The end of week questionnaires (below) ask basically the same questions as the pre-week questionnaires – you could also click on them and calculate your score by yourself before and after you start following the Handbook (but please don’t actually submit the scales).

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Please use your email address or you can also adopt a pseudonym (which can be virtually anything, though not something which someone else might also use, eg. ‘Seneca’), when filling out this questionnaires. The email address is preferable so that we can get in touch in a few months time to ask about the long-term effect of Stoic practices.

During the week: Read the Stoic Week 2013 Handbook, follow the daily exercises, and explore the suggested key Stoic theme each day.

To support your practice of Stoicism, please also use the following audio resources, all available for as mp3s for download, which are referred to in different parts of the Handbook.

There will also be articles uploaded daily to read on the blog during the week about different ways Stoicism is still used today, as well as the Stoicism Today magazine 2013 (released soon) for extra-reading.

You might also consider blogging about the week and make video diaries (and let @Stoic Week know on twitter), writing in with an idea for a guest piece on the Stoicism Today blog, and posting each day your reflections on this blog about how that day’s practices are going for you. Basically get in touch and we will share what you are doing!

After the week: At the end of the week, please fill out the same surveys, with the same email or pseudonym. Please use these links for the post-study questionnaires:

The statistical analysis of Stoic Week 2013 will be published early in the New Year. We will contact participants who have provided their email address a few months after Stoic Week to ask about the long-term impact.

The most important lesson for me today was to not let what is hindering you stop you from what you can do. There are almost always obstacles and hindrances when we try to do what is good. These obstacles might limit some of our responses. Still, if we focus on what we can do and get a little creative about new paths to take we can often improve the situation. Even if this fails, we can always accept things as they are. This will prevent us from getting vexed by the situation. No matter how ugly things get, letting our selves get vexed and worried will only make things worse. So, no matter what the outcome–the best path is to always focus on what you can control–your own thoughts, words, and deeds.

Thanks for your message. Certainly, quite a few who are taking part are already interested in Stoicism, but plenty of participants are new to Stoicism, and the Handbook is very much geared towards people who have not necessarily come across Stoicism before.